New Toolbar PageRanks visible

Roughly every 3-4 months we take a snapshot of PageRank values and export them so that the new values are visible in the Google Toolbar. I believe that another set of PageRanks started going out on Friday. New PageRanks are visible at many data centers, but not at every data center. Why not at every data center? Because some data centers are using a slightly older infrastructure for a few query types that are off the beaten path a bit (info:, link:, toolbar PageRank queries, etc.).

Matt, I often wonder, how is the PageRank value stored internally, is it a floating-point number as many people suggest or is it just the integer value itself due to the heavy recursive PR computations?

I noticed this update last week. You post answered why the update between data centers are not finished yet. Because of of the infrastructure. I think the new PageRank will not display until all data centers use the same infrastructure.

Matt,
Thanks for the update. Getting confirmation and updates such as this make being a webmaster much easier. I can now take less time fretting about PR updates and focus on building content for my site that will provide value to our users.

Over the past two weeks, my toolbar PR has been flipflopping between 4 and 5. I tell someone it is 5, and they tell me it is 4. I check it is 5, but they still insist it is 4. Google’s way of entertaining us 🙂

Nah, it’s at least over a month old.. as I have a website I launched last month that has about 1400 links (according to MSN)… but google still show’s 0… and a PR of 0. (although it’s alexa is still below 200,000)

Looks like the link: update is done in a greater monthly cycle than the pagerank one… or at least vastly differing cycles.

Who is getting 10/10? a few random checks say http://www.apple.com wins (10!) over ibm, sun, microsoft (all 9) and mit,cmu,stanford aben old cambridge universty (all 9 as well).
Kudos for apple but … who else is there?

Atanas has it right, the PR released is a snapshot from around July 21-23, and uses the same data as the August 24th strange, frozen PR/BL event. (http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=129939 – what was that, Matt?) The backlinks released Friday are later than that – September 7th, I think.

Actually, I am just curious why you are bothering telling us about a new PR update…. is this the first time you ever did? Are you just playing with people to make us wonder why you are talking about something.. ?

I noticed the pr update, was this all it was? The serp relative to my site have change completely since this pr update happened. You say that the pr update is a snap-shot of an already exciting value within the google system, therefore the serps should not change just because the visual pr changes. Should I wait for a data push to see the true extent of the pr changes.

Not that I follow PR, but wouldn’t it be better for that livePR analyser thingy to just check one IP address on each of Google’s 44 active Class-C blocks, rather than a random (but fixed) 69 IPs out of more then 700 that are actually active? Although a lesser number, wouldn’t it be more representative of what is going on? … At present, nothing at all is checked an any of the other active 22 Class-C blocks.

Everyone is always wondering about PR and how it is calculated.. as I have seen very weird results to some sites especially new websites having a lot less backlinks gain PR4-5-6, any explanation on this?

I did a lot of changes, mainly reorganizing my pages, so had lot’s of index removing and 301’s to do and that was hurting my SERP’s, now things seem to get back to normal … 🙂 Or is that just a coïncidence and has nothing to do with each other?

Matt’s playing with us!!! Otherwise the green in my toolbar would have moved at least 0.0005 mm.
I like this new spam control on your blog though. Is this effective as image verification?
Thanks for the update on pr update anyway!

@ Matt Crouch. you ask why he posted this. I am not sure, but I am very glad he did. His brief explanation of the TB Page Rank update process will prove invaluable when that “hard to convince” webmaster does not understand why his PR has not changed yet.

Toolbar PR is not PageRank. The Toolbar numbers are labels, and that’s all. They could equally well have been labeled A to K. Actual PageRank is a number (0 to nnnnnn…), and not a label. Each Toolbar label represents the portion in the 0 to nnnnnn scale where the page’s actual PageRank lies. So, no, the Toolbar values are not the PageRanks that are used by the engine.

I have some thoughts about whether or not the new Toolbar values are old, and why some people see evidence that it can’t be old, and others see evidence that is must be old.

To the best of my knowledge, PageRank is being continually calculated on a rolling basis. If that is so, then all but the current part of the index that is being calculated is always out of date to a lesser or greater degree. The most out of date it can be depends on how long it takes to move round the whole index. The new PR values are a snapshot, and any snapshot must include current and out of date calculation results (PageRanks).

That’s my best guess, anyway. If it’s anywhere near the mark, today’s calculations will include links that were found and indexed yesterday (they may only have been put up yesterday). And the PageRanks for the part that will be calculated tomorrow only included the links that were indexed some time ago – as long ago as it takes for the entire index’s PageRanks to be calculated. So, if the snapshot is taken today, the ages of the links that were part of the calculations can vary a lot. Some Toolbar PR’s won’t reflect links that were indexed quite a long time ago, whereas some Toolbar PRs could reflect links that were only put up, crawled and indexed yesterday.

Michael: Although you list 41 IP addresses in that [i]SEOlogs[/i] tool, you’re only checking stuff on 19 out of the 44 Class-C blocks that are currently active.

On some Class-C blocks you check just one IP, and on others you are checking 4 or 5 IP addresses. Why not check one IP from each of the 44 blocks instead? Wouldn’t that give a better picture? At present there are [i]25[/i] Class-C blocks that are not checked at all – that’s more than half.

Michael: Although you list 41 IP addresses in that SEOlogs tool, you’re only checking stuff on 19 out of the 44 Class-C blocks that are currently active.

On some Class-C blocks you check just one IP, and on others you are checking 4 or 5 IP addresses. Why not check one IP from each of the 44 blocks instead? Wouldn’t that give a better picture? At present there are 25 Class-C blocks that are not checked at all – and that’s more than half.

It looks like some of the Google tools [ PR , site: , backlink etc etc ] being applied are misleading webmasters into their supposed accuracy, in which many believe, insofar as there is differentiation between DC’s at any one time, plus time lapses and selective suppression of information in total.

It would be good if there was consistancy upon which siteowners / webmasters could rely upon. Otherwise, they have limited status as a “tool”.

hi matt, i think the following question is generally applicable to a *lot* of webmasters these days: if a site’s PR has been flipping up and down the past few days, can we expect it to stabilize at the higher value when this update/export is over? I think you may have answered it in technical terms before, but I don’t understand the answer… I need it in plain English for us cybermorons… I have noticed many sites that are experiencing this, and a lot of questions on forums from people confused about it.

I have been an avid observer of the Google Dance and I have seen great fluctuation between the updates and recently (the last 3 months) I notice that the update has occurred multiple times within a fairly short time-frame. Is it safe to say that the update will be initiated more frequently to ensure accurate information?

Btw, I like the Spam Protection you have set-up, I have implemented the same feature into all my contact pages just about a month ago. Keeps our inbox clean.

Matt, my boss gets so excited he nearly wets his pants when he hears about a PR update and yet he has never had a proper link-building strategy; 300 links in 6 years… Could you tell him to calm down please?

So are you able to confirm that the PageRank shown in Google toolbar is ony as good as the pagerank for that specific web page on the day of the snapshot?. I appreciate that it would probably be impossible to update toolbar pr everyday, but does Google re-calculate for each and every new day?

We can only hope the PageRank update will be any day soon. In your Google Webmaster account, under Crawl Stats – is that the live PageRank value, or is that only exported every few months when Google also exports the Toolbar PR’s?

Frankly Matt, I think at this point many webmasters would be glad to exchange their 2006 PR values from the latest Google Page Rank update on October of 2007. Funny how those people who didn’t care about page rank are the first ones to cry about it when the little green bar takes a dip. It’s not to say that the website is a mere shadow of it’s former self, it’s just a more realistic reference point minus the inflated links.

Seems to me that a lot of people are seeing a delcine rather than an increase. My site still has low page rank. But on some pages on my site when you check the google links it list the home page meaning that in thoroey it should have a rank over 4 right.

I am happy to see my page rank updated, but, most of the my friends who are bloggers and had a high page rank of 4 have been reduced to 3 and 2. Is it because they are not updating their blog, or they haven’t optimized their blog and built links.

Hi! I’m new to all this – so apologies for asking a potentially ‘dumb’ question – or one which has been covered earlier. How do I track when a page rank for a specific page changes? Is there software available? All help, kindly appreciated! thx.

Yes, definitely you need to query different data centers to find the average PR. It would be great Mat if you could keep PR history and PR prediction updates by date so we all know when will approximately the next PR update start.

I was very disappointed by my websites http://wolfet.co.uk pagerank after the last google PR update, i thought that i had done plenty enough back linking work to see a big increase in PR, im guessing that i must do 10 times more than i did to see an increase, maybe im just a pessimist but it seems that the big names on the web just get bigger and bigger while us small fish float around trying to pick up the left over scraps, i recently watched some of your many video clips on http://www.youtube.com ,the one explaining what googlebot does with 404’s ect explained with colored M & M’s was very amusing to watch, btw i read here that the google toolbar PR’s are updated every 3-4 months, but when and how often are the google’s PR database’s updated?, is that being updated constantly day by day?

I am very happy with Google, I have been waiting for my site http://www.puresa.co.za to be ranked and when it was it came in at PR 4/10, it has been up for 2 months and we have put a tremendous amount of effort into our SEO..Thanks, Google and thank you Matt..

I am still trying to find out when the next pagerank update will be? I am also interested in knowing how long it takes google to find the links i’ve posted on different website. Our dry cleaners delivery service would benefit from getting some more traffic, looking forward to seeing the results for our dry cleaners in the future.